Another typhoon slams soggy Philippines

Residents waded through a swamped road Friday as they fled to higher ground following severe flooding in Calumpit township, Bulacan province, Philippines.

The second typhoon in a week battered the rain-soaked northern Philippines today, compounding the misery for tens of thousands of people, while several other Asian nations also reeled from flooding.

Typhoon Nalgae came ashore south of northeastern Palanan Bay in Isabela province with winds of 100 miles per hour and dangerous gusts of 121 mph.

It was making a similar path across the saturated Luzon island as Typhoon Nesat, which earlier in the week killed at least 50 people, left 31 missing and thousands stranded, and sent huge waves that breached a sea wall in Manila Bay. Nesat also pummeled southern China and was downgraded to a tropical storm just before churning into Vietnam on Friday, when flood warnings were issued and 20,000 people evacuated.

In the Philippines nearly 400,000 hunkered down in evacuation centers and in homes of relatives and friends along the new typhoon's path, with heavy rainfall of about an inch an hour within the storm's 340-mile diameter that put most of the northern provinces on alert.

Isabela authorities earlier shut down electricity in the province to prevent accidents from falling power pylons and snapped cables.

The howling winds toppled trees and blew away tin roofs on some houses in Isabela's capital, Ilagan. In nearby Luna township, a bus with about 30 passengers was blown on its side in a rice field because of the winds, but no one was seriously injured, police said.

In the last four months, prolonged monsoon flooding, typhoons and storms across Southeast Asia, China, Japan and South Asia have left more than 600 people dead or missing.

In India alone the damage is estimated to be worth $1 billion, with the worst-hit state, Orissa, accounting for $726 million.

Several studies suggest an intensification of the Asian summer monsoon rainfall with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, the state-run Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology said. Still, it is not clear that this is entirely because of climate change, especially in India, it said.

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